Knowledge Page Saro Van Cleynenbreugel

How our system works

A description of our aquaponics system

Our Aquaponics system is a simi-closed food growing system. A continuos flow of water connects the fish to the bacteria and the plants. Nitrogen from the fish is made available for the plants as Nitrate with the help of the nitrifying bacteria. We have about 40m2 of Aquaponic grow beds at Mediamatic.

 

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Aquaponics plumbing - Saro Van Cleynenbreugel

Flow of water and shit

The pump is pumping water simultaneously into the fishtanks and the top grow beds.
Two pumps basically do the same thing, the only difference between pump 1 and 2 is that the both take half of the top grow beds for their account. 

To the fish

1. Water from the sump tank is pumped to the five fishtanks
2. The polluted water in the fishtanks overflows to the solidfilter
3. The solid filter overflows back into the sump tank

To the Plants and bacteria

1. Water from the sump tank is Pumped to the top grow beds only
2. The top grow beds Syphon empty into the growled directly below
3. The bottom grow beds syphon into the 70mm drainage pipe that runs the water back into the sump tank.

 

Failsafe system

Waterflow sensor:

The most important failsafe system is the flow sensor. This sensor is giving a realtime waterflow in the google spreadsheet named flow sensor date, you can find in in de MMAquaponics shared folder.

Power Alarm (the manual for this you can find in the bottom of this page):

There are two GSM Power Alarm modules installed at the entrance of the fish container. The function is to send a text message to a group of people when the power fails on one of the pumps. The alarm will also be triggered when the waterflow comes below a curtain level. Procedure if the alarm goes as follow, we all come together in the Aquaponics WhatsApp group and decide on what to do. Read here for further instruction for if stuff goes wrong. Instruction on programming you can find in the manual in the bottom of this page and passwords and phone numbers here.

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Aquaponics automation -

Datalogging

Here you can find more info on the accounts we use for data logging:
Datalogging and monitoring
Manual logging:

Results from chemical water tests or amounts nutrients added we write down in our Nutrient log spreadsheet that can be found also on the google drive, MMAquaponics shared space.

Fish feeding:

This is been logged on analogue form. Typically laying on top of the box with fish food. New forms can be printed from The google drive.

Research data:

For this we use Evernote, this we use as a shared notebook service where we can upload pdf's and other research topics.

Spreadsheets:

For this we use a shared space on google drive. Examples are planting plans, detailed data on plants.

Automated:

The flow sensor is continuously pushing data to flowsensordata spreadsheet in the google drive. Information about these logging systems can be found on this page.

General Communication

Work Tasks

With the team we communicate task using the free service microsoft ToDo. This is a service that works on all platforms from your web-browser and provide apps for several platforms.


Group Chat

For this a SignalApp group is found most effective where the whole Aquaponics team is part of.